Improve Your URL Structure: Know How To

One of the most controversial elements that baffles web developers and SEO experts is how URL affects Google crawling. While these two factions see URL structure as different things, the groups are further subdivided on how exactly it can affect the whole SEO effort.

Is URL structure really important in ranking websites?

The answer is both. Yes and no. Although, that’s another story altogether. But first, we need to determine what makes a good URL.

Here are three things that any URL should carry:

1. Direct. This is fairly obvious. The URL represents what the page is all about. Naturally, it should describe such in a smart, capsulated manner.

2. Directional. Aside from being succinct, the URL should also be incredibly descriptive. Brevity is a crucial factor in reigning in descriptions, that’s why a URL that’s both descriptive and brief is considered directional.

3. Accessible. One of the main features of blogs are its pages. While Google is dedicated in crawling every page of every blog, you can spare the search engine the time, and only present the URL which are of most important to you. Blog posts should be presented up and center, as they are signals to perpetuate that your blog is alive.

Adhering to those above­ mentioned rules can only help you improve URL description. You can only do so much with these three, and there is still a lot of work to do in improving URL structure. Descriptive or static URL’s are more SEO­ friendly, and dynamic ones, even when both are friendly to search engines, can decrease your SEO effort greatly.

Avoid dynamic URLs.

Nobody really knows how Google crawls the web. And how it interprets your signals. However, there are fundamental things you can do to your URLs in order to increase likability.

Rule number 1 is avoiding numbers, punctuations and the like. URL with these kind of writing is called dynamic URLs. In the past few years, Google have been very big on being content- exhaustive for increased user satisfaction, and delivering a descriptive URL is one foundation of the matter.

In a search engine results page (SERP), there are three elements which Google shows: the Page title, site URL and meta description. This is how you mostly do SEO – focusing on those three.

But that’s only the surface. Under the simplicity of it lies a web of support marketing and advertising – which in turn, makes a page rank on Google.

One part of that support marketing is SEO. And part of SEO is the organisation of your URLs.

Index not the pages not to be indexed.

Say, when your website is constantly updating, Google will be crawling your content every now and then. Make sure that it does not have a hard time doing that.

What you can do is decrease the pages which search engine crawls. Example pages are usually terms and conditions, company profile, and everything else which aren’t of concern to your audience.

When you closed off some of the unimportant pages from Google’s crawl, you make your website friendlier to crawling.

It will remember that effort, and in the right time, it will reward you greatly.

In the end, make a conscious effort to re­assess your XML sitemap every now and then. This is important in order for you to access your URLs easily.

Through time and experience, I have become a highly motivated SEO Team Leader with comprehensive knowledge and skills in SEO, flexible to a tee and versatile to adapt to any new environment. A proud staff of Just Simply Outsourcing Worldwide.